Chris Driscoll on Management

The Mediocre Manager's Customer Problem

2011-06-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

"Everything would be fine if it wasn't for our customers."

"The customers don't know what they want, they change their minds all the time."

"It's crazy, everyone thinks they are the most important customer."

This is sure a new take on "customer complaints." Usually we mean that the customer has complained about a product or service, not that the company has complaints about its customers. That's what these quotes are. Internal service providers complaining about internal customer behavior.

I have the advantage of having consulted in pretty much every industry by now. I've been in life sciences for a long while but earlier in my career I consulted airlines, oil companies, governments, pet hospitals and pretty much everyone else. What I value most is the time I spent with clients that sold their product or service directly to the public. These are folks that understood customer service because they got meaningful feedback. By meaningful feedback I mean that when they didn't serve the customer the customer went away.

That's the problem with internal customers. They can't leave. They do business with internal service providers because they have to. Most of the time they have no other option. What this creates is a service provider who gets used to customers that can't leave. Service providers learn to take customers for granted so much that they begin to say things like the quotes I started with.

I had a room full of internal service providers last week who said, "We need to tell our customers what happens to us when they change their mind. They need to appreciate what we go through. They all feel like whatever they want should be the most important thing."

At that point I shared an analogy that seemed to give the group pause so I'll share it here...

What would you do if you were in a nice restaurant waiting a long time for your order and the chef came out of the back and said the following: "Do you have any idea what we're going through back here. I have to cut vegetables and then I have to cook them. After that, I have to put them on plates, it's crazy. All of you people think you're the most important customer and you need to organize yourselves better so you don't put so much pressure on me. You all tend to show up at the same time and I think you could organize that better. Maybe one or two at a time. Also, if you could sit with the people who are ordering the same thing as you that would be helpful. I know you came with other people but when everyone at a table orders something different....that's just ridiculous. Do you understand?"

Harry Truman

2011-05-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not big on leadership quotes. The last thing most would-be leaders need is another platitude. That's why I like something Truman said so much. It's the kind of concise practical statement that would never be attractive to the would-be leaders that prefer puffery to productivity.

Truman exceeded expectations by just getting elected. Then he set about accomplishing a lot more than anyone expected while in office. Later, he was interviewed about his approach to leadership. Truman's response has more value for today's would-be leaders than any leadership book ever written. When they asked him to describe his successful approach to leadership he said:

"I make a decision and, if it's wrong, I make another one."

Too often leadership teams in our industry lack action orientation. Value is seen in discussing problems and then deciding to gather more data. The problem is that learning is stunted this way. Without the action no feedback is gained on whether the decision was right or not. The organization doesn't get better and the leader doesn't get better.

None of us work in an idea factory. The ability to execute seperates the strong leaders from everyone else. Execution starts with the willingness to make a decision and, if it's wrong, make another one.

Games People Play

2011-04-21T06:57:00.000-07:00

There was a grid of 2 X 2 foot squares on the floor created with masking tape and my job was to guide my partner from one end to the other. I was at a meeting of my peers from other sites within one of the biotech giants. We’d been meeting quarterly for about a year when our global leader organized this team building event.

We were divided into pairs and one person from each pair would walk across the grid and the other would be the guide. The guide’s instructions were to look at the answer key and find the path of squares that was deemed “safe”. If the guide didn’t work fast enough or accurately enough and the walker stepped in an “unsafe” square, they had to go back to the beginning.

I got into a crouch by the grid and my partner stood at the start. When the facilitator said go, I pointed my finger at the first safe square. I knew if I stood back and pointed in the general direction that there was room for misinterpretation of which square I pointed at. So, my finger was only a couple of inches away from the square and I pointed at its center. When my partner’s foot reached the square, I shuffled over and pointed at the next one and this is how we made it to the end.

I was pleased with our success but part of me was wondering what the activity was supposed to prove. I didn’t have to wait long for an answer. I noticed that one of my peers was also squatting next to the grid but he did something weird with his hand. Instead of pointing at the square, he had his palm open and facing up and he moved it very slowly from where his partner stood to where he wanted her to step next. At first I thought there was something wrong with him, like maybe he was having a stroke. His movements didn’t seem natural and the approach was slower with more room for error. Then I noticed that his partner, clearly in on the objective of the exercise, had an expression on her face like she’d just won the lottery AND been crowned Miss America. On it went as they crossed the room, him with the bizarre Vanna White gesture to the next square and her with the ecstatic step.

Not for the first time, I thought I’d joined a cult and not a company. Turns out, the object of the game was to demonstrate how people like being invited to do things rather than told. No one said it directly, but I think I played the role of the insensitive ogre in this exercise.

It’s important to note that no one said anything directly about that because no one said anything directly about anything. Inviting people to accomplish something with complete focus on the “how” instead of on the “what” was not just the object of the game for this company, it was the default mission of the company. When your highest priority is coddling, you may eventually get where you want to go, it will just be after everyone else and with lots of detours along the way. You think that approach will help us compete globally? Nope.

The best thing we can do for any performer is to be clear. There is nothing rude or insensitive about saying, “this is what you need to focus on.” It’s a lot more effective than saying, “Say, if you get a chance, and, you know, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I mean after you get back from the juice bar, but maybe before your massage, could you possibly make a little product if that’s ok?”

Castration Isn't Reversible

2011-03-30T15:25:00.000-07:00

This is something organizations realize when they've been micro-managing and controlling mid-level managers instead of empowering them and holding them accountable.

Managers grow accustomed to existing in an environment where they are not allowed to make decisions that impact their area. Managers should be REQUIRED to make decisions that impact their area but this isn't the tendency in our industry. Our industry expects managers to wait to be told what to do because of our faith in the scientific pecking order. That's the pecking order of technical expertise and it reflects a belief that the best decisions are made by the highest ranking technical expert. It also believes that any previously made decision is fair game for dismantling if a higher ranking technical experts disagrees.

Organizations that operate this way are everywhere and it's understandable because of the science that makes us who we are. However, we need our managers to be scientific thinkers that are also decisive. When we create an environment that rejects the decisive manager, we create an environment that cannot compete effectively in the commercial sector. Over time, the natural tendency of the manager to treat the organization as if it's her or his business fades away. The manager becomes an organizer of tasks, an expert at slow and steady (mediocre) performance. Where once an organization had a new manager who was a potential difference-maker, they now have just another body going through the motions.

Then one day the organization confronts the result. The FDA points out that random errors seem to happen to this company quite a lot. The parent organization starts to compare the cost of this site to the cost of contract manufacturing options and begins thinking the CMs look pretty good. That's when change comes to the company. It turns to it's mid-level of management and says, "We know we didn't let you make decisions before but now is the time! Let's see that entrepreneurial spirit! Let's see that fight! Let's see what you can do!"

The only response is a vacant stare because .... castration isn't reversible.

Experts vs. Consultants

2011-03-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

Remember those logic games from school that defined relationships using circles? A circle containing the word US Presidents would be shown inside the boundary of a circle containing the word Americans. What this picture represented was that all US Presidents are Americans but not all Americans are US Presidents. While engaged in some home improvement last week, I thought about the arrangement of circles for Consultants and Experts.

I was at Home Depot looking to purchase enough tile to finish the floors in a couple of rooms. I found the kind I wanted and just then a Home Depot employee approached and introduced himself as Bob. That's when the fun ended.

Bob was an expert. He told me he had 25 years of experience laying tile. The problem was, I didn't need an expert, I needed a consultant. As an expert, he was really only able to talk about how he would do the job himself.

He told me I shouldn't by the same tile from different lots. He said that the size and color can vary. This meant that I would have to order my tile or go to another store. Both options would cause major delays. Bob also told me that I shouldn't buy the pre-mixed adhesive that I'd used successfully on past tile projects. He said I should get the powdered variety because I could get it cheaper. He glossed over the fact that I would need to buy a special bucket and stiring tool in order to work the powder with water. All of Bob's recommendations started with the phrase, "What I used to do is...." That's the way experts talk. Consultants are differnt.

As a consultant, Bob would have had his tiling experience but he would have been skilled at understanding me, the CLIENT, and the CONTEXT of the situation. Bob would have recognized that I was going to do one tile job. The added cost of special buckets and stiring rods isn't recovered with powdered adhesive if you're only doing one job. Bob also would have heard my strategy to minimize opportunities for error with home improvement projects. He would have heard me say that getting the tile cut and set right was my focus and I didn't want to add complexity by measuring powder and water. He would have realized that pre-mix was even more the right choice.

Bob also would have stepped back and realized that only a select group of people can see the difference in size and color across the same tile from multiple lots. He would have realized that the select group who can see the difference consists of people with 25 years of experience laying tile and no one else. Bob would have realized that his gift of being able to discern microscopic differences in size and color is an irrelevant externality of a long tiling career, nothing more.

Instead, Bob played the expert and I nodded and smiled at all of his sage advice. Then I left his store empty handed and bought what I needed somewhere else.

All consultants are experts, but not all experts are consultants.

Oobleck

2011-02-16T07:49:00.000-08:00

Oobleck is a Dr. Suess term that is also used to describe the non-newtonian fluid you get when you mix two parts cornstarch with one part water. My 8-year-old and I were watching a youtube video of oobleck experiments when it occured to me that most organizations behave exactly like oobleck.

(Before I get into that, you might want to check out the video we watched. There are plenty of oobleck videos but this one is in Spanish and the stars are especially enthusiastic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2XQ97XHjVw

The video demonstrates the behavior of non-newtonian fluids. Whereas a newtonian fluid, like water, provides increased resistance to increased force, non-newtonian fluids are the opposite. The guys in the video can literally run across the top of the pool of fluid but what happens when they slow down? They slowly sink into a gloppy mess.

Organizational change, in my experience, is exactly like this. You must move quickly and keep moving in order to be successful. What often happens instead is that organizations begin a change initiative and then encounter resistance. This resistance is predictable because we're human and humans, generally speaking, resist change. The problem is that when this initial resistance shows up, the initiative pauses. All it takes is that pause and the oobleck of organizational culture takes effect. The lasting image is of the change initiative saluting as it sinks below the surface and out of sight.

In leading a change initiative, remember that you work in oobleck. Keep moving.

Illusory Feedback

2011-01-15T06:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a math test for you. What is:

1 + -1

Very good, the answer is 0.

You're on a roll so we'll do one more. What is:

-1 + 3

If you said 2 you're right again.

I mention this math because of a couple conversations I've had with managers over the last few months. I was coaching the first manager on giving good feedback. I emphasized the need to be clear and we worked on that point for a few minutes. He said he understood everything I was saying but one of his folks threw a curve ball recently. He said he was giving this person some corrective feedback and the person responded, "now that you've given me negative feedback you're supposed to give me 3 pieces of positive feedback." The manager I was meeting with asked me if I supported that. That's where the second bit of math comes in. I explained that if you want your message of correction to be received it's not going to help you to give a message that's artificially positive.

The first math related to the same thing with another manager. He said he'd actually attended training where the trainer said every corrective feedback should be matched with a positive and vice versa. This is a great approach if your objective is to sit down with an employee and communicate absolutely nothing. The net result will be zero.

I encourage managers before every feedback session to decide which side of the fence they're on regarding the individual they're about to meet with. Either they feel like they're getting mostly what they want from the person or they feel like the person isn't delivering up to the expectations of the managers. The feedback should carry a positive or negative charge depending upon which side of the fence the manager is on.

It's important to note that this isn't year-end review feedback (which is another illusion). The feedback I recommend should be given every couple of weeks and it should refer to the last 2 weeks of performance. A person could get a good boost in one meeting and if they fall asleep for two weeks they should hear about it in the next meeting. Likewise, if someone is mailing-it-in over a period and gets negative feedback, they have a chance to course-correct and get an affirmation of that in 2 weeks time.

This approach builds more agility into the workforce becuase it is incremental. Most managers in our industry don't even meet with their direct reports let alone give clear feedback at an appropriate interval. If you haven't been doing this and you start doing it, you'll see the results in the improved performance of your team within the month.

Good luck.

The Greatest Problem with Communication

2010-12-21T07:38:00.000-08:00

According to George Bernard Shaw, "The greatest problem with communication is the illusion it has been achieved."

That's among the most important quotes for any would-be leader or manager to remember. It's so easy to feel like we've done our jobs as managers because we've said something to our direct reports. We've said it or we've written it down or we've done both and therefore we feel like communication has been achieved.

Much has been written about how to communicate with employees effectively. The result of all the writing is corporate wall-space covered with posters and executive speeches full of slogans and cliches. If you ask me, all of this just adds to the illusion.

The only form of communication that really makes an impact is the one-to-one, across the table, whites of the eyes, crystal-clear kind. I've seen this consistently in 20 years of consulting and there's plenty of direct evidence to support it. But today, I want to talk about some indirect evidence.

A University of Colorado Researcher and some colleagues recently published a very interesting study regarding the apparent gender gap in the academic performance of physics students. In short, women typically perform at a level lower than men in stem (science, technology, engineering & math) classes. The research team ran an experiment to see whether they could affect the gender gap by inserting a simple writing exercise during the semester. The writing exercise asked students to choose from a list of potential personal values the ones that were important to them and to write about why they chose what they did. Simply by inserting this writing exercise, the gender gap in academic performance vanished.

Why? Well, the researchers aren't ready to draw any conclusions so I'll do it for them. We all respond better when we feel acknowledged. The women were in a field where they knew their gender typically underperformed. When they were given a chance to talk about their unique makeup through a description of their values, they went past gender to the core of who they are. There they found the unique strengths that they'd developed over the course of their lifetime and with that acknowledgment or validation they went into stem class exams and did better.

This is why one-to-one meetings are critical for top performance in the workplace. We need to reach the person doing the work. We can't just input data (give them a to-do list) and expect excellence. If we want the whole person to come to work, we have to invite her/him. The way we do that is to listen to our direct reports in a manner that isn't just a review of the task list or problem areas. We have to ask them what's important to them, how they like to be communicated with, how they like to be recognized etc. These questions get near the personal values topic and they tap more of the individual's potential.

I'm under know illusion this message has been received so I'll repeat this post in a few months:-)

Here is the paper I referenced:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-11/uoca-ggi112210.php

Happy Holidays

The Power of "They"

2010-11-18T09:23:00.000-08:00

Eckhart Tolle wrote a book called the “Power of Now” that was an international best seller. The book addresses how to live a better life by focusing on the present. I’m simplifying but that’s the idea. I think in corporations people are accustomed to living a better life through a different power, “The Power of They.”

The word “They” is a simple pronoun but in the hands of someone who doesn’t want to be accountable for something it’s enormously powerful. Many supervisors and managers are highly skilled in the use of the word “They”. Here’s an example of how it’s used:

Eric (Operator): Hey Bob, why don’t we hire another person on our shift, we’re really stretched.

Bob (Supervisor): I know man, I tried to get us more help but they won’t listen. You know how they are.

The power of “They” in this case is that it absolves Bob of all accountability. He’s just an innocent bystander to the misdeeds of the “They”. He’s effectively maintained rapport with Eric by saying that he personally agrees with Eric but then turns and assigns blame to the unnamed “They.” Great stuff.

The problem with this behavior is that it’s very widespread and it kills employee engagement. Bob may have saved himself in this exchange but he’s thrown the rest of the organization under the bus and he’s created an environment that will be impossible for Eric to excel in. Employees need to feel strongly that they have everything they need to do their work well. When managers agree with employees that they lack something critical, they can be guaranteed that the person will underperform.

When employees ask for more resources managers really have only two options:
1. Get the thing that the person requested.
2. Tell the person that it’s not coming and they are still responsible for the set expectations.

When managers do this, employee’s remain clear about expectations and they can perform. Ultimately, they respect their boss and appreciate the clarity. Managers who use the world they as the cause of the trouble are maintaining their individual rapport with the person at the expense of the organization.

NOTE: This is almost always what’s happening when climate surveys show that people feel positively about their immediate managers but believe that higher-level leadership is underperforming.

In closing, the message for managers is to stay in the game. When you back up and point above yourself for the source of problems you are playing the part of “manager as innocent bystander” and performance in your group will suffer.

Good luck.

Corporate Dementors

2010-10-11T05:27:00.000-07:00

I’m on my way to some meetings on the East Coast and planning to take the long way home through Orlando so my son can experience Harry Potter World, the new park at Universal Studios. Apparently I’m also excited about the trip because I was just thinking about how a group of characters in Harry’s world relates to some in the corporate world.

It’s the Dementors I’m talking about. In the story these are some truly creepy folks. They wear dark hoods and cloaks and they appear to be physically rotting. They suck out all the hope from the area simply by their presence. The worst part is that the ultimate doom they execute on a person is the Dementor’s Kiss which sucks the soul right out of the victim.

That’s not a pretty picture. So, what or who in the corporate world could possibly be viewed as similar to these foul creatures?

The good news is that it’s not an individual or function. It’s more a collective acceptance of mind-numbing mediocrity from each other that plays the role of Dementor. I especially like the imagery of the Dementor’s Kiss. Something that would seem so affectionate, a kiss, actually sucks the life out of the victim. I think companies do this.

This is a different version of “killing with kindness.” Our companies are focused on everyone being nice to everyone else. I know of a company that just rolled out a program that typifies this behavior. One of the key actions people are to take is to “say good morning and mean it.” Most companies are down this path. The trend is to focus on being nice to each other and the highest priority is to avoid upsetting anyone. We pay lip-service to performance but really the indicator most companies watch is contentment. It's like this:

Do people seem calm and relaxed without any signs of conflict? Yes! Our hands around the campus program worked. Listen, you can hear all the operators singing that song with the Whos from Whoville following the Grinch’s reform. (Oops I’m mixing my Hollywood metaphors here, back to Harry Potter.)

This focus on congeniality is a Dementor’s Kiss. We all work in the commercial sector and our top-level deliverable has to be high performance. It’s not true that happy people perform better. What’s true is that ENGAGED people perform better and there is a huge difference. Engagement includes feeling good about your work for all the right reasons. You’re clear on expectations and get rewarded when you do well. Without the focus on performance, we end up grading people on their ability to make others happy. High performers feel their souls leaking out of them if they stay in these places too long. They want to contribute, to make a difference, to be part of something larger than themselves. When instead they get coached on holding the door for each other and being just a little more chipper in the mornings, they start to leave in one of two ways. Either the Dementors Kiss works and they become an empty shell of their former selves, or they see what’s happening and they leave in search of a company that offers something real.

Management Lessons From Farmer Ewell

2010-09-14T08:46:00.001-07:00

I met Ewell at a farmer's market in my home town. He and his family run a place called Pachamama Farm where they grow and sell organic vegetables. I bought a share of his CSA (community supported agriculture) and now pick up a box of vegetables from Ewell every week.

A few weeks ago during vegetable pickup Ewell was telling a story about the development of the farm and his story contained a great management lesson. In the early days of the farm Ewell hired a number of Hmong workers to help him and his family work the land. Everyone worked hard and worked well. Then the workers asked Ewell if they could have a small patch of land for their own farming. There were some vegetables native to Laos that weren't on the planting list for Pachamama and the workers wanted to plant them.

Ewell's first response was "No." I should note, Ewell is a great guy. He quit a job he didn't like to start the farm because he wanted something more than a paycheck. He wanted some connection to the earth and to do something that made a positive difference. He wasn't saying "no" to the workers because of some miserly tendency. It just didn't make sense to him. He described thinking that the work the workers were hired to do might be neglected if they had their own patches to attend to.

Some time passed and Ewell continued to see great work from the workers. He also started to see some strange plants growing up in every available corner dirt patch on the land. The workers hadn't been granted any land but they'd managed to drop a seed here or there. This got Ewell's attention and he made a call to an organic farmer friend up in Minnesota. He told his friend that everything was going well and he also shared the request he'd had from the workers. His friend's advice was, "give 'em some land." Ewell was leaning in that direction anyway so that's what he did. Before he knew it, beautiful crops of vegetables he couldn't name began growing on their designated plots and Pachamama kept producing everything else too. Ewell said it seemed like the great work got even better after the workers got their own land to work. Instead of getting less output by granting their request, Ewell got more.

So, what's the management lesson?

Know Your People

This is at the heart of employee engagement. A manager has to know who's on the team and how they are wired in order to maximize productivity. Ewell stayed with the opportunity long enough to get to know his people a little better and the result rewarded everyone.

Most managers in our industry manage their teams as if the team members think exactly the same way as the manager. They assume universal wiring and take one-size fits all actions. When I'm coaching managers and ask them why they handled a certain situation the way they did, they tend to put themselves in the place of the employee. For example, they'll say "I give feedback that way because that's the way I like to receive it." That's a problem. As managers, we need to study our people and understand them. When we customize our message for the person, we create a connection and clear communication. With that established performance gets better and our best people stay.

Managers Still Trump Companies

2010-08-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

I've done more work with employee engagement in biotechnology than anyone and I've previously blogged on the topic. After several more projects and many insightful meetings with biotech managers I offer this update:

Managers Still Trump Companies

This statement means that no matter what the organization does a person's engagement with their work is primarily influenced by the immediate manager. I was in a conversation early today with a manager, a good one, who was debating me on this point. He said, "There's no way that what I do impacts my people as much as the decisions that corporate makes for us." He was frustrated so I spoke carefully when I told him he was wrong. Whether corporate does something good or something bad, at the end of the day it's the manager's actions that carry the influence.

Think about your own track record. Have you ever worked for a highly respected company of brilliant employees and found that you didn't really like your job? How was your relationship with your boss? Most of the time there is a direct correlation between the relationship with the boss and the relationship with the job. If the company is great and your boss is asleep at the wheel, you're not going to like your job. The opposite is also true. If the company is clueless but your boss is a talented manager, you're going to like your work (though the work may not last long if the company is truly clueless).

All this is true but I want to return to my frustrated friend. The steps he can take to engage his team, in spite of all of the macro issues the larger corporation has, are clear. Managers need a strategy for their department or area. I wrote about this in the Strategy Deployment section of "Managing the Core." The one-page strategy, or Gameplan, contains the reason the department exits (mission), what the department is trying to accomplish (objective), what it needs to do this year (strategy), and what it will do this quarter (tactics). The Gameplan process shows managers how to involve team members in the development process and how to review the Gameplan on a quarterly basis. Most importantly, the Gameplan is written FOR THE TEAM. Most strategy documents are written for someone's boss. When you write them with the team and for the team, performers feel like they have input and ultimately control over the team's activities. This establishes the Gameplan as the reference point for the team. All of the ups and downs of the larger corporation continue to be interesting but they do not detract from the team's level of engagement. With a local Gameplan the performer's world gets a little smaller and more controllable and this makes engagement easier.

You can buy "Managing the Core" at Amazon.com

Be Careful What You Get Good At

2010-07-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine joined a financial services company about 10 years ago and he was interested in becoming a stock broker. The head of the office hired John and explained the he would pay him a salary for 6 months as John learned the business and got some clients of his own. Thereafter John would need to be generating his own fees from managed assets.

Like all new brokers John entered the world of cold-calling. He wanted to show his boss he was doing a good job but he quickly realized he wasn't going to demonstrate that with an immediately high volume of incoming cash. This was before the market meltdown but it was still tough to establish trust and get people to invest with a 20'something with no meaningful experience. So John and the other newbies were measured by the number of calls they made in a day. The brokerage house knew that the name of the game with young brokers was to make lots of calls and they would learn what worked and what didn't. So, in the early days, John told me about how many calls he was making in a day. Ever supportive to my friends, I think I said something like, "gosh, that's quite an existence you've carved out for yourself John."

My sarcasm aside, John actually learned how to do it. He began bringing in significant investment dollars after a couple of months and had a successful career at the company. But not everyone was like John. After John had been their for 4 or 5 months he told me about a co-worker that was still coming by his desk and saying things like, "100 calls already this morning man, can you beat that?" The thing is, John explained, the guy had brought in almost no money. He was still counting calls when the successful people were counting dollars.

Does this show up in Biotechnology? Yep. It does. How are your metrics for closing Nonconformance investigations? Are you getting better at rework?

I've worked with organizations that ran 6 sigma projects to get better at something they didn't need to do. I've also worked with clients that found a way to check errors soon enough so they didn't need to record an error but instead could just take the time to do it right before proceeding.

Be careful what you get good at. The more efficient we get at unnecessary non-value adding activity the easier it is to institutionalize. Once waste gets in that deep, your team begins describing it as "the way we've always done it." Worse, the unnecessary process grows like a vine through something that is actually required and then disentangling everything is nearly impossible.

Be careful what you get good at.

To Improve As A Technical Manager, Start At The Start

2010-06-15T05:37:00.001-07:00

A few years ago I decided I wanted to try doing a triathlon. I'd been cycling and running regularly for years so I decided that I should focus most of my attention on the swim portion of the race. Early on I searched online for "beginner triathlon tips" and was pleased to find a high volume of information. I took much of the advice offered and my performance suffered because of it.

The online advice said that I should focus on the transitions between events. In olympic distance triathlons you swim .9 miles then jog to a transition station and prepare for cycling. You then ride 25 miles and return to the transition area to prepare for running (change shoes, drink water). You then run 6.5 miles to finish the race. The experts online said that it was important to arrange your equipment in a certain way at the transition so you didn't waste any time between events. One of the items mentioned is rolling cycling socks into kind of a doughnout so that when you put them on your wet feet post-swim you can roll them up instead of trying to tug them on. This was typical of the beginner advice offered on line.

My race results showed the problem with this kind of beginner advice.
40 Minute Swim
2 Minute Transition
80 Minute Cycle
4 Minute Transition
54 Minute Run

The doughnut move for my socks contributed to the timing of my first transition. I'd just completed the swim in a shockingly slow 40 minutes (40% longer than the average for my age group). My transition time of 2 minutes was in the top 25% of competitors. So was the advice I read online good or bad? Clearly it was bad advice. I had a horrible second transition where I couldn't find the appropriate bike rack and I ran, than walked around the transition area for what seemed like and hour before finding my spot and beginning the run. Still, when you look at my time for the second transition it was only 4 minutes. Now that's a poor showing when you compare my time in that transition to the others but it still doesn't add up to much. Rather than reading about rolling up my socks and similar transition tips, I should have been focused on how to improve my swim.

It turns out that I don't swim straight and my kick negatively impacts my propulsion. I could have worked these two issues and improved my overall race time by more than 10 minutes with relative ease. With the big-ticket items handled, I could have focused on doughnut rolling my socks to shave an extra 30 seconds in subsequent races.

Biotech gives technical managers bad advice too. We send them through public speaking classes but ignore the fact that they don't know how to deploy a strategy. We teach them the finer points of conflict resolution when they don't understand the key points of employee engagement.

Strategy Deployment and Operational Engagement are the two most important management responsibilities. Focusing technical managers on anything else is the same as teaching a new triathlete to roll his socks into doughnuts.

Decentralization is Better

2010-05-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

There is a popular movement among large companies to centralize functions. This is appealing to senior leadership because it creates the appearance of efficiency and standardization. Unfortunately, the negative consequences are significant and a decentralized approach is better.

Centralization creates situations like the one face by a current client of mine. This manufacturing site has a site head with a dwindling number of direct reports. All of the people who used to report to the site head still work at the plant they just report to global function heads that are not resident at the plant. The result of this is a so-called site head that actually controls relatively little at the site. Instead, he/she communicates plans with the function representative seated at the leadership table and they each go off to confer via phone with their offshore bosses who rarely agree on anything because they've often never met and their reference point is not the day-to-day activity of the site but instead the standards and policies of their own function. The result of this approach disengages leadership at the site and that has a trickle-down affect. I've seen entire sites experience drops in productivity because of diminished engagement.

Of course it's true that a centralized company can still be engaged but it is much tougher. When site leaders don't have sufficient decision-making authority themselves they cannot effectively empower people within their organization. Whenever they are asked for something they have to give the dreaded "I'll get back to you" response to employees. By doing this they marginalize themselves.

Decentralization is better. Manufacturing locations should be held to budget targets and other goals and managed according to their ability to deliver results. The site head role should be an extremely challenging and accountable position. The site head needs the authority to decide on most of what impacts his or her site. Of course their are safety and compliance standards and policies that are not negotiable but those are far outweighed by what the site head actually can control. When a site head feels accountable he or she empowers teams and the result is easier site engagement and improved business results.

Pretend Jobs

2010-05-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

When a company creates a job out of a collection of non-value adding activities that company has created what I call a pretend job.

No company wants to create pretend jobs because they are clearly wasteful and these days we’re all working to reduce costs. No individual wants to work in a pretend job either. The positions are often purely administrative and individuals in the roles feel underappreciated by the core business.

If no one wants these jobs to exist, why do they?

Think about a start-up company that has had some success and decides it needs to begin behaving like a big company. This company usually decides that the action it needs to take is to build out its support functions. This means that VPs are hired to head up HR, Finance, Quality, Engineering, Maintenance, IT, Purchasing, Operational Excellence, etcetera, etcetera. These organization heads then set about building their teams. This is a key point in time because it’s the point of departure from letting customer demand pull activity to letting administrative aspirations pull activity. In other words, the heads of the functions don’t look exclusively at the product portfolio or pipeline for evidence of the number of resources they need, they consider what fully functioning corporate engineering (maintenance, HR…) departments typically need. The reference point for growth of the function is not true demand. That’s when pretend jobs are created.

At first glance, it would appear that the waste associated with a pretend job is the cost of the person in the position. Unfortunately, it’s much worse than that. When people show up to work at these pretend jobs they do so with the intention of doing good work and making a positive impact. They set about building the policies and standards they’ve been asked to develop based on their awareness of how grown-up companies do things. In a very real way, the result of their work is the creation of unnecessary work for others. Again, this is completely well-intentioned. No one can blame a person for doing the job they’ve been hired to do. However, it’s important to point out that any output from a pretend job is waste.

Much of my work with clients in Cost Reduction and Cost Control uncovers work that is easily identified by the organization as Non-value-adding. They know it is work they shouldn’t be doing, but they don’t know how to get rid of it. I help them get rid of it by tracing the work back to the original decision that created it. We make our way through and disentangle the various assumptions and real needs until we find what we need to change to remove the requirement for the unnecessary work. This is a valuable process and the client is faster, less expensive and more flexible afterward. The even better option would be to avoid the pretend jobs and the non-value adding activities in the first place.

The Problem of Rapport

2010-04-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The Greatest Problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.” I use this quote a lot in my work with managers because there are a lot of illusions around communications in corporations. Messages from corporate have to be generalized to apply to entire organizations so they tend to lose whatever meaning was originally intended. Other leadership messages published for a large group of employees need to go through several layers of communications professionals and legal watchdogs so that they too quickly lose whatever meaning they were supposed to convey. Finally, the individual manager has been conditioned by the corporation and the overall culture to soften every message lest we offend anyone. The result is that not even messages delivered by immediate managers carry meaning and that’s the biggest problem of them all.

The connection between managers and their direct reports is the core of engagement and the most significant lever for organizational performance. So, when communication from managers to employees lacks effectiveness it translates into a performance problem that hits the bottom line.

Many of my clients have a particular issue in common with regard to management communication. What they have in common is that they have created environments that reward the manager for building good rapport with direct reports but not for engaging direct reports. Organizations reward rapport by using 360 degree feedback instruments as a large part of the manager’s performance review process. These instruments are opinion-based and most easily influenced through an emphasis on affability and approachability. Both of these traits are important but if the focus is on rapport without a simultaneous focus on engagement it’s easy to get into trouble. Here’s an example:

Imagine you’re an engineering manager in a biotech company and you know through your interaction with your boss that you’ve just reorganized and you have no plans to add full-time staff in the next two years. Imagine that in this context one of your employees approaches you and says, “We’d be more successful if we could hire a couple more people.” If you’re focused on rapport, how will you answer this question? Most managers answer it this way, “I know it’s tough right now, let me see what I can do.” I would submit to you, that this is a damaging answer. Engagement is all about clarity of expectations and the belief that everything needed to perform to those expectations is available. When the manager answers this question to preserve rapport, he simultaneously makes things less clear. In this example, the manager essentially confirms that the work group doesn’t have what it needs. He says that he knows things are difficult and that he’s going to try to get more help. This solidifies the impression in the staff person that more people are needed. This is clearly counter-productive for the manager as he knows what the answer will be when he asks his superiors for more people. What the manager gains in incremental rapport, he loses in employee engagement.

Managers must replace their rapport priority with a higher level objective of clarity. The most important role of the manager is to insure that the team is clear about where they are going and that they believe they have what they need to get there. Rapport is a component of communication, but not the endgame. A better answer from the manager in this example, is to say, “Let’s talk about the business plan for the site and the headcount decisions that have been made. We have the headcount we’re going to have and our job is to perform with what we have. I’m open to getting the team together and eliminating work we don’t need to be doing, but I want to be clear that we’re not going to be adding headcount.”

This type of answer may create some initial disappointment, but it preserves clarity and will keep performers engaged.

Obstacles to Employee Engagement in Biotechnology

2010-03-19T16:31:00.000-07:00

Why Engagement Matters

A company with a disengaged workforce will underperform the competition.

A company with an engaged workforce will:

Outperform the competition
Change quickly to meet market conditions
Acquire and merge without a drop in performance

The Biggest Obstacle to Engagement

The foundation of engagement is clear expectations. Lack of clarity of expectations is the number one reason organizations have disengaged employees. In biotechnology companies, the biggest lack of clarity is in the area of the resources required to get the job done.

What this means is that there is a difference of opinion between what the organization thinks is needed from a resources perspective (materials, equipment, human resources, time, etc) and what the individual performer believes is necessary. This difference of opinion is measurable and it is fixable. The difficult part is that it can only be fixed by each employee’s individual manager.

Engagement is about perspective. The employee’s perspective that she knows what she needs to do. Her perspective that she has what she needs to do her job well. This perspective is shaped by the words and deeds of her manager. This is true even if the words and deeds of the manager are in conflict with the messages from company leadership, HR, and co-workers. Managers are the lever to engagement and they are the lever to disengagement.

It’s because of this highly influential role that managers are unwittingly disengaging their biotech teams. Here’s how it happens. A staff person in manufacturing comes to his boss and says, “we’re short-handed, when are we going to be able to hire another person?” The supervisor responds, “I don’t know but I hope soon. I’ll keep working on it.”

This is a problem because it affirms that the employee is currently short-handed and provides no assurance that anything is going to be done about it accept the boss’s effort to “keep working on it.” Versions of this exchange take place with tools, equipment, benefits and staffing conversations every day. In parallel to this exchange, the manager knows he’s had a conversation with his bosses and that there are no current plans to hire in the near future. It’s not a lie for the manager to express that he’d like a staffing increase but it is a disengaging message.

Whenever I work with managers I emphasize that every request for a resource needs to be answered one of two ways. The first, “Yes, I’ll go get one of those for you right now.” Or, “No, we’ve done the analysis on that and it makes more sense for us to stick with the current equipment and make it last as long as possible.” I’ve included a little color around these examples but the possible answers are simply “yes” and “no”. Any answer other than one of these has the potential to cause disengagement.

This is a slippery slope for managers because they tend to want to preserve rapport with direct reports. This is further exacerbated by the fact that organizations don’t grade personnel management ability with engagement scores. Instead, they grade managers with 360 degree evaluations and other opinion polling. This grading system incentivizes the manager to focus on rapport. When you focus on rapport you don’t want to let anyone down so you tend not to word negative answers very clearly. Negative answers end up being surrounded with rapport-preserving phrases like “I’m working on it, I’ll see what I can do and I’m doing everything I can.”

I’ve seen this across our industry and in technical industries in general. Climate survey data shows that the managers are highly thought of but the workforce takes issue with the performance of the next layer up. This is a sure sign that the immediate manager doesn’t own the answers he gives to resource requests.

Sometimes it is necessary to answer resource requests with a “I’ll need to check on that” kind of response when that’s the truth. But managers need to put themselves on a loud timer when they go off to explore the issue. As quickly as possible a performer needs a clear yes or no in order to get/stay engaged.

The fact is that a performer may not “like” the negative response to a request but they will be clearer about expectations and they will get over the disappointment and stay engaged. The managers I work with get to experience this result and learn to value clarity above all else. Valuing clarity first means they move quickly when answering requests and avoid “I’ll get back to you” like the plague. When they do have to use it, the “get-back” comes in hours, not days.

Technical Manager's Advantage

2010-02-28T18:43:00.000-08:00

Managers who are also scientists or engineers have a tremendous advantage when it comes to managing people. This is probably the opposite of what you've heard or read about managers but it's absolutely true.

For simplicity I'll refer to these folks generally as Technical Managers. Technical Managers are data hounds. They understand the value of metrics and their eyes look for trends and information whenever data is presented. They are also problem solvers at their core. They have experience designing something, trying to make it work and revising their approach based upon the data they receive. These technical competencies are exactly what make personnel managers great.

If what I say is true, why is it that Technical Managers are constantly hearing from HR that they need to improve their "people skills"? Books have been written and training abounds for the technical managers who've been told to go off and improve themselves.

The reason for this is that management effectiveness has largely been a matter of opinion, not measurement. The most an organization typically has in rating a manager's effectiveness at managing others is a 360 survey. These surveys are pure opinion and often result in a development plan for the Technical Manager that sends him or her seeking better "people skills".

It doesn't have to be this way. We now have several effective ways to measure a manager's ability to engage his/her team. The best of these surveys go far beyond simple workplace opinion surveys because they have been designed from business performance data. In short, the points on the surveys have been proven to be the differentiating issues for top performing work groups.

Technical Managers can achieve their potential as the best managers in business when we put meaningful data in front of them. This turns the formerly amorphous area of their work, the personnel management side, into something real. They see the connection between their interaction with employees and employee engagement. More importantly, they see the connection between employee engagement and business performance. Once Technical Managers see the connection, organizational performance improves dramatically and quickly.

In my next entry I'll reveal the single greatest obstacle to employee engagement in science-based companies (and how to fix the problem).

Cognitive Bias

2010-02-14T13:27:00.000-08:00

This is a new blog and I wanted my first entry to sound important so I called it "Cognitive Bias".

I've always liked the word cognitive so I try to work it into conversations whenever possible. For example, in the checkout lane this afternoon the woman at the register asked, "How are you today?" I replied, "Pretty cognitive, you?" Unfortunately she wasn't as big a fan of the word and she just kind of stared at me. I actually had a similar experience when I got a little overzealous with the word convoluted, another favorite word. I was having dinner with a group of colleagues and someone asked me what I thought of the wine. I took another sip and said, "It's nice, I find the finish to be somewhat convoluted." The individuals around the table who knew something about wine (and English) gave me the same blank stare as the checkout lady. The good news was that the people around the table who knew even less about wine than I do smiled and nodded admiringly. I digress, but if you're at dinner and no one knows anything about wine, give the "convoluted finish" thing a try and let me know how it goes for you.

Ok, allow me a serious word or two in this the first post. Cognitive Bias actually refers to the tendency of a group of people to base a perspective on rules of thumb or simple habit. This bias can lead to erroneous conclusions.

The reason I wrote "Managing the Core" is because there is a Cognitive Bias in many technical businesses these days that is suppressing performance. Leaders and managers of all levels in biotechnology, semiconductors and other science-based industries have a Cognitive Bias toward technical solutions. It's understandable that technical companies value technical solutions but this bias not only leans the organization toward technical solutions it also leans them away from personal solutions.

Management is a people-based business. Leaders and managers must be able to recognize when a non-technical solution is needed. When they instead follow their Cognitive Bias, the company underperforms. "Managing the Core" was written to give managers a path to follow so that their management ability keeps stride with their technical ability. This Blog will explore core management issues and I hope it will be a place for all of us to learn something. I can assure you that with every post you read, you will feel more cognitive and we will always avoid a convoluted finish.